A Sociophonetic Analysis of Country Music
Date
2013
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Producer
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Choreographer
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Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
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Rehearsal Director
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Department
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
Type
Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
The social factors that influence style shifting in regular speech are the same or similar to those that influence an artist's style shift from speech to song. At the same time, since the style shift in musical performance is often above the level of consciousness, there is a question as to why this would occur. It seems that given the stereotypical association between country music and the Southern United States, there should be a relation between country music and a Southern accent. I explore phonetic aspects of dialect usage in American country music, focusing on artists' vowel space and production of coda Irl, coda Ill, and velar or alveolar (ing) in song and speech. Using a corpus of36 songs from across the careers ofKenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, and Keith Urban, I collect approximately 11,000 vowel tokens and several hundred ofeach consonantal variable. While in general, American artists sing vowels lower and fronter in the mouth (higher Fl and F2 values) than they speak them, country singers nonetheless style shift in their songs as compared to their speech. I argue that this is a case of referee design, and outline what I call the Country-6 model, comprised of six features-- raised and fronted BA TH, DRESS, and KIT vowels, a monophthongized PRICE vowel, inconsistent pronunciation of coda Irl, and use of alveolar [m]--whose use defmes the country accent in music. Crucially, each feature is an enregistered part of Southern American English.